Attachments
I. ESTABLISHING LINKAGES BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND WOMEN’S AND GIRLS’ UNPAID CARE, DOMESTIC AND COMMUNAL WORK
The global care crisis is being aggravated and intensified by environmental degradation and the global climate emergency. Its impacts are more acute for people with scarce resources and low incomes, especially in rural areas of the Global South. Climate change exacerbates women’s and girls’ disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work. Globally, they already spend three times as much time on this work on average as do men and boys. Moreover, time-use surveys from around the world reveal that when paid and unpaid work are combined, women work longer hours overall than men do.
The gaps are even wider for women and girls living in rural areas who are the ones responsible for managing resources and services for daily household consumption; their workload can vary in areas with limited access to regular essential services such as energy, water and sanitation. For example, in Senegal rural women’s unpaid work, including domestic work, caring for relatives and communal work, takes 4 to 8 hours a day but at times up to 12 hours a day, which is significantly higher than the global average of 4.5 hours. In the Arab States, which has the highest women-to-men ratio of time spent on unpaid care work, women spend, on average, between 17 and 34 hours per week on unpaid care work, whereas men spend no more than 1 to 5 hours.
Moreover, care work and care responsibilities affect women and men in different ways depending on circumstances, including their gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation and gender identity, disability, marital status and migration status. This paper is grounded in an intersectional approach to women and girls in all their diversity, recognizing their differences and the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination they face.
The cascading crises of recent years with their multiple dimensions and uneven recovery worldwide have disproportionately affected women and girls, deepening the structural challenge of gender inequalities. The gendered division of labour and the unequal social and economic organization of care are among the six ‘structural nodes of inequality’ (see Box 2).
These nodes reinforce each other and generate complex structural barriers and discriminatory social norms that hinder and reduce the scope of policies for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Efforts towards gender-responsive outcomes need to tackle the structural nature of the challenge and the multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination that women face. Moreover, the experiences of countless women are at risk of being completely overlooked if women’s and girls’ disproportionate responsibilities for unpaid care and domestic work are not understood and recognized. To achieve gender equality, it is vital to recognize the economic, social and affective value of unpaid care and domestic work, including through integrating it in measures to go beyond GDP to “value what counts”, reducing its time and effort and redistributing it more equally between women and men and between households and the state.
Consequently, care should be acknowledged as a public good, universal right and essential building block for economic and social well-being and sustainable development. Its low status and unequal gender distribution constitute key barriers to women’s social, political and economic empowerment. Furthermore, care work should be recognized as work, as skilled work and as a public issue, as opposed to merely a private family or household matter (see Box 3).
While there has been progress in addressing some of the structural challenges of gender inequality in research and policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation, better understanding of the linkages between climate change and women’s and girls’ unpaid care, domestic and communal work is needed for climate advocacy and policy and programmatic action.